Alex Hamilton obituary

Novelist, journalist and former travel editor of the GuardianThe novelist, journalist and former Guardian travel editor Alex Hamilton, who has died aged 85, had an unusually hard struggle to become a writer. At 10 he could not finish his first novel, a tale of imperial derring-do, because he ran out of space in his school exercise book. His second, a war story penned at Oxford University and drawing on his childhood experience of Brazil, he described as “a synthesis of Dostoyevsky and PC W